October - November 2000 | Copyright © 2000 by Peter Nepstad | Issue 5 | |
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Inscrutable Oriental plots World Domination | |||
Western Visions: Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril The Yellow Peril Yellow Peril Meets Red Menace Fu Manchu: The Yellow Peril Personified Yellowface "The World Shall Hear from Me Again" [Bibliography
and Links]......... |
This article is in five parts. This is part one. To view one
of the other parts, click on the numbers below.
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
The Yellow Peril
But first,
we must narrow the scope of our investigations. For 'Western' cinema, we
will look predominantly at America, home of Hollywood. Asia is a big
place, and by 'Asian' I suppose I must mean the same thing that 'Oriental'
would have meant at the turn of the last century, which is, any country
from Egypt through India and at last to the far east of China and Japan.
All have problematic representations in Western Cinema. The representation
of Asian-Americans (or rather, the complete lack thereof) forms another
subset of the discussion. I propose in this article to discuss
specifically Chinese representations in Western cinema, focusing first on
the primary channels through which the west has historically come to
'know' the east, then on the tradition of 'Yellowface' acting which allows
the west to play act their knowledge thus gained, without the interference
of reality, and finally to explore the 'Fu Manchu' series of films as the
most prominent example of these visions in Western cinema. Even with this
narrowed scope, however, it will be necessary to occasionally turn to
Asian-American, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean representations anyway,
because of the Western tendency to confuse and blend the various cultures
together.
The original Yellow Peril: Attila the Hun and his mongol horde, swooping through Europe in the
5th Century BC, displacing peoples such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths,
who then in turn pushed into the Roman Empire and sacked Rome. All of
Europe lived under the shadow of invasion for some fifty years, until
Attila dropped dead, the Huns dropped back, and the threat of invasion
faded. But the image remained, reinforced by the later incursions of
Genghis Khan: picture the Golden Horde, vicious, demonic peoples whose way
of life is utterly foreign, who seem to have inhuman courage and
endurance, who do not feel pain, who know nothing of the rules of war and
do not take prisoners, who rape and pillage, who are invincible and
unstoppable. Hold on to this image, as we now need to take it in its
entirety and transpose it onto nineteenth-century America, where the idea
of the Yellow Peril once again took root in Western society.
Chinese first immigrated to America in large quantities when
reports of the California Gold Rush reached coastal China in 1849.
Immigration reached its gold rush peak in 1852, when over 20,000 Chinese,
mostly farmers from around the Canton area, headed over to work mines in
search of gold. The immigration slowed drastically afterwards, until the
late 1860s, when Chinese papers advertised looking for workers on the
railroad, and the rush was on again.
With such a large number of
immigrants in California, China could no longer be simply an exoticized
and distant 'other.' So Chinese instead became a clear and present danger.
California strongly wished to enter the Union as a Free State, that is,
one without slavery, and it did so. Perhaps less widely known is that it
wanted no blacks, free or slave, in the country, and instead keep
California a pure, white land. Attempts were made to legally restrict
entrance of California to only free, white people, some successful, some
not. Although the debate began as black/white issue, it soon became clear
that the Chinese would be a greater threat to California's ideal of a pure
white land (in the 1850s, when California had only 4000 black residents,
there were 47000 Chinese). At the same time, small mines were being
pressured out of business by larger mining operations. Those Chinese who
still worked various private mines became the outlet of white anger, and
blamed for lost jobs. In 1854 the California Supreme Court ruled that the
Chinese could not testify in court in any case in which a white person is
a party. The threat of the Chinese to the working class and their jobs
continued to be a constant theme up through the early 20th Century.
Having been driven out of mining and agriculture, and laid off as
work on the trans-continental railroad came to a close, the Chinese
immigrants moved into other work, such as manufacturing, laundering, and
domestic occupations, running head first into another minority group: the
Irish. The Chinese would often take lower wages than the Irish workers,
and many employers found them by and large to be a far superior working
group to the Irish, cleaner, more hard working. But the leaders of the
Irish community took the opportunity to attempt to raise their own status
in Anglo-Saxon society, by promoting a sort of pan-ethnic whiteness,
defining Irish and Anglo-Saxon peoples to stand together in a 'white'
category, as separate from 'black' or 'yellow' races. They used the
imagery of the Yellow Peril -- legions of Chinese sweeping into the
country, taking away the good honest work of the white man. They were for
the most part very successful. Even today in America, the lumping together
of all white races is done as a matter of course, without thought.
American legislators became obsessed with stemming the oriental
tides that they feared would soon overtake them. In 1790, the
Naturalization Act explicitly stated Naturalization as a citizen was only
possible for "free white persons" only. This did not necessarily exclude
Asians, as many people considered the Asiatic races to fall into the
'white' category (at least, George Washington did). In 1870, the abolition
of slavery prompted a change in the wording, and it was amended to include
persons of African descent. It was also amended to specifically
exclude persons from China. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was
passed, banning not only Naturalization of peoples from China, but
immigration as well. It allowed for some loopholes, which were quickly
closed up with an 1884 amendment. Ironically, just a couple years later,
the Statue of Liberty is unveiled in New York City.
Having stemmed
the illusory tide, there was still the question of what to do with the
Chinese immigrants already residing in the United States. Race riots in
San Francisco and elsewhere made it clear that they were seldom welcome.
They represented another facet of the Yellow Peril: the threat of
miscegenation. Immigration policy kept the amount of Chinese women at a
bare minimum, in an attempt to discourage immigrants from permanent
residence. At the same time, coincedentally, far more Irish women survived
the potato famine and immigrated than did men. Their prospects for finding
a suitable Irish man rather limited, then, a statistically insignificant
few did in fact marry Chinese men. Even this small amount was unacceptable
to the Irish community, trying at that time to create a clear color line
between the two races. In fact, the term 'micegenation' was coined by
Irish pamphleteers decrying inter-racial marriage (the earlier term,
'amalgamation,' was not as negative as apparently they wanted it to be).
Even today, the threat of miscegenation looms. In American cinema,
although white men are often romatically engaged with asian women, only
very, very rarely will you see an asian man and white woman romantically
involved with each other, and even then the relationship is seldom
demonstrated explicitly.
A vast hoarde of the unknowable other,
poised to take over our jobs, our women, our country. This is the image of
the Yellow Peril, set in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It
would prove to be a remarkably resilient vision, which has lasted up until
the present day. The next section will explore the transformations of the
Yellow Peril myth in the twentieth Century.